Two Poems for Dr. King on April 4——National Poetry Month 2025

 

Martin Luther King lays on the balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel moments after he was shot as aids point to where they believe the shot that killed him was fired.

Except for the month of April, this blog is generally in the business of history. But in this month dedicated to poetry, things that matter can get short shrift. Take today. It is the 57th anniversary of a gut-wrenching occasion that left a scar on the nation and on many of our hearts. It was on April 4, 1968 that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. He was in the city to complete some unfinished business—a march in support of striking garbage collectors, a follow up to an earlier march where violence had broken out as younger marchers began smashing shop windows.He returned against the unanimous advice of his closest associates. But he felt he had a duty to complete the march in peace. 

 

On the eve of his assassination Dr. King delivered his eerily prescient final speech to a packed church.

The rainy night before, Dr. King went to a local church that was packed to the rafters to hear him. It was there that to a strangely hushed crowd he delivered his own elegy: 

… I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. 

The night of the killing riots erupted around the nation. Black rage boiled on to the streets. In Chicago the West Side burned. White America cowered in front of their television sets in fear and horror. At tiny Shimer College, I locked myself in a closet and cried for what seemed like hours. 

We’ll leave it to the pathetic conspiracy theorists to argue about who to pin the rap on. It really doesn’t matter if we know the name attached to the finger on the trigger, or the names of who may have paid or abetted, or even of those who just winked. A festering boil of racism killed Dr. King in the forlorn hope that they could kill his dream and the march to justice. Traumatic events like this are often processed through poetry. Think of Walt Whitman’s elegies to fallen Lincoln—O Captain, My Captain and When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloomed. 

Today, let’s remember through the eyes of two Black women. Nordette Adams grew up in New Orleans. After a varied career as a journalist, government public relations person, ghost writer, technical writer, and writer and producer of documentaries, she is concentrating on her creative writing and poetry. 

 

Nordette Adams.

 Remembering A Life 

I remember him in the misted vision of toddler years 

and again in girlhood, the booming voice on TV, 

someone grown-ups talked about, eyelids flapped wide. 

Elders huddled ’round the screen enraptured, 

in fear for him, in awe. 

 

I remember him. His words swept the land, singing our passion. 

Dogs growled in streets. Men in sheets. 

Police battering my people. (Water, a weapon.) 

Yet my people would rejoice ... And mourn. 

 

I remember him, a fearsome warrior crying peace, 

a man—blemished by clay, the stain of sin as 

any other, calling on the Rock— 

Death's sickle on his coat tails, 

yet he spied glory. 

 

Shall we walk again and remember him, 

not as the Madison Aveners do, 

but in solitude and hope 

with acts of courage and compassion, 

with lives of greater scope 

carving fresh paths of righteousness? 

 

I remember. 

—Nordette Adams © Copyright January 2004, Nordette Adams 

 

June Jordan.

June Jordan was born in Harlem in 1936 and grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, Poet, activist, teacher, and essayist, she was a prolific, passionate, and influential voice for liberation. Jordan died in 2002 but lived and wrote on the front lines of American poetry with political vision and moral clarity. 

In Memorium: Martin Luther King Jr. 

I 

honey people murder mercy U.S.A. 

the milkland turn to monsters teach 

to kill to violate pull down destroy 

the weakly freedom growing fruit from

being born 

 

America 

tomorrow yesterday rip rape 

exacerbate despoil disfigure 

crazy running threat the 

deadly thrall 

appall belief dispel 

the wildlife burn the breast 

the onward tongue 

the outward hand 

deform the normal rainy 

riot sunshine shelter wreck 

of darkness derogate 

delimit blank 

explode deprive 

assassinate and batten up 

like bullets fatten up 

the raving greed 

reactivate a springtime terrorizing 

death by men by more 

than you or I can 

 

STOP 

II 

They sleep who know a regulated place

or pulse or tide or changing sky 

according to some universal 

stage direction obvious 

like shorewashed shells 

 

we share an afternoon of mourning 

in between no next predictable

except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal 

bleach the blacklong lunging 

ritual of fright insanity and more 

deplorable abortion

 more and 

more 

—June Jordon From Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005) © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust.

 

 

 

Amanda Gorman still just 27 years old has become America’s most popular and widely read poet. She has piled accomplishment upon accomplishment up in a few short years from graduating from Harvard suma cum laude and being named the first National Youth Poet Laureate overcoming learning disabilities and a speech impediment. 

Her poem for Joe Biden’s first inauguration, The Hill We Clime made her a national celebrity who followed up with other high profile performances at the Library of Congress, the Super Bowl, and the 2024 Democratic National Convention as well as a bestselling collections The Hill We Climb: Poems and Call Us What We Carry and Something, Someday for young readers. 

Gorman has also carefully curated her own image as a fashionista, designer, model, brand spokesperson, and entrepreneur. She is also politically active and has openly said she want to run for President in 2036. 

In addition to the aspirational anthems that have inspired so many, Gorman also uses her poetic platform to address major social issues including climate change. In the wake of the May 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Gorman published a short poem on Twitter and encouraged action to promote gun safety, as well as penning Hymn for the Hurting. She continued to express her support for Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in a poem posted on Twitter on June 24, 2022, which includes the line, “We will not let Roe v. Wade slowly fade.” 

Today we will look back at the poem she read at the Library of Congress back in 2017 when she was named National Youth Poet Laureate. 

The hand written manuscript of In This Place (An American Lyric) is preserved at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

In This Place (An American Lyric)

There’s a poem in this place— 

in the footfalls in the halls 

in the quiet beat of the seats. 

It is here, at the curtain of day, 

where America writes a lyric 

you must whisper to say. 

 

There’s a poem in this place— 

in the heavy grace, 

the lined face of this noble building, 

collections burned and reborn twice. 

 

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square

where protest chants 

tear through the air 

like sheets of rain, 

where love of the many

 swallows hatred of the few. 

 

There’s a poem in Charlottesville 

where tiki torches string a ring of flame

 tight round the wrist of night 

where men so white they gleam blue— 

seem like statues 

where men heap that long wax burning 

ever higher where Heather Heyer 

blooms forever in a meadow of resistance. 

 

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant 

of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising 

its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago— 

a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil, 

strutting upward and aglow. 

 

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas 

where streets swell into a nexus 

of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown, 

where courage is now so common 

that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters. 

 

There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide 

where a single mother swelters 

in a windowless classroom, teaching 

black and brown students in Watts 

to spell out their thoughts 

so her daughter might write 

this poem for you. 

 

There's a lyric in California 

where thousands of students march for blocks, 

undocumented and unafraid; 

where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom 

in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community. 

She knows hope is like a stubborn 

ship gripping a dock, 

a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer 

or knock down a dream. 

 

How could this not be her city

 su nación 

our country 

our America, 

our American lyric to write— 

a poem by the people, the poor, 

the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,

the native, the immigrant, 

the black, the brown, the blind, the brave, 

the undocumented and undeterred, 

the woman, the man, the nonbinary, 

the white, the trans, 

the ally to all of the above 

and more? 

 

Tyrants fear the poet. 

Now that we know it 

we can’t blow it. We owe it 

to show it 

not slow it 

although it 

hurts to sew it 

when the world 

skirts below it. 

 

 Hope— 

we must bestow 

it like a wick in the poet 

so it can grow, lit, 

bringing with it 

stories to rewrite— 

the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated 

a history written that need not be repeated 

a nation composed but not yet completed. 

 

There’s a poem in this place— 

a poem in America 

a poet in every American 

who rewrites this nation, who tells 

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth 

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time— 

a poet in every American 

who sees that our poem penned 

doesn’t mean our poem’s end. 

 

 There’s a place where this poem dwells— 

it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell 

where we write an American lyric 

we are just beginning to tell. 

 —Amanda Gorman

On Trans by Miller Oberman—National Poetry Month 2025

Poet Miller Oberman and his new collection Impossible Things.

Yesterday, April 1, was the Trans Day Visibility. But it is not too late for this apt verse from Miller Oberman, the author of Impossible Things, from Duke University Press, 2024 and The Unstill Ones, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017. He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Poems from Impossible Things have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, and Foglifter. Poems from The Unstill Ones appeared in Poetry, London Review of Books, The Nation, Boston Review, Tin House, and Harvard Review. Miller is an editor at Broadsided Press, which publishes visual-literary collaborations and teaches at and serves on the board of Brooklyn Poets. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in New York. 

 On Trans

The process of through is ongoing. 

 

The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall 

down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. 

 

We were just going. I was just leaving, 

which is to say, coming 

elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words 

 move through my limbs, lungs, mouth, as I appear to sit 

peacefully at your hearth       transubstantiating some wine. 

It was a rough red,                 it was one of those nights we were not 

forced by circumstances       to drink wine out of mugs. 

Circumstances being,            in those cases, no one had been 

 

transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough       to wash dishes. 

I brought armfuls of wood                              from the splitting stump. 

Many of them, because it was cold,                went right on top 

of their recent ancestors.                                It was an ice night. 

 

They transpired visibly,            resin to spark, 

bark to smoke, wood to ash.     I was 

transgendering and drinking     the rough red at roughly 

the same rate                            and everyone who looked, saw. 

 

The translucence of flames       beat against the air 

against our skins.                     This can be done with 

or without clothes on.              This can be done with 

or without wine or whiskey     but never without water: 

 

evaporation is also ongoing.                     Most visibly in this case 

in the form of wisps of steam                    rising from the just washed hair 

of a form at the fire whose beauty was      in the earth’s 

turning, that night and many nights,          transcendent. 

 

I felt heat changing me.                    The word for this is 

transdesire, but in extreme cases      we call it transdire 

or when this heat becomes your maker we say 

transire, or when it happens             in front of a hearth: 

transfire. 

—Miller Oberman

Our National Poetry Month Series 2025 Kicks Of With Cheryl Caesar’s Aftermath

It’s National Poetry Month again! If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our 14th annual round-up of daily doses of verse! If you are new, here’s the scoop. Every day of the month I will feature poets and their poems. I aim to be as broad and inclusive as possible in style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices. 

Many years certain themes emerge either by plan or by happenstance. This year I suspect we will share voices of experience of repression of all sorts and rising resistance. The times call for the poet as the prophet, tribune, and rebel. We’ll see. I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too. 

As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims. Yours may be different. But I am open to—eager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers. I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts. I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff. Please feel free to turn me on to some. Here is a challenge—Poets, send me your own best stuff be it personal, political, or polemical. I don’t and can’t promise to use everything. E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net . 

Cheryl Caesar.

Today we will kick things off with a tone setter—Cheryl Caesar’s Aftermath. Caesar is a writer, teacher of writing and visual artist living in Lansing, Michigan. She is an associate professor at Michigan State University and does research and advocacy for culturally-responsive pedagogy. 

Aftermath first appeared in Across the Margin. Cheryl’s chapbook of protest poetry Flatman (Thurston Howl Publications) is available from Amazon. 

Other artwork and verse has appeared in journals including Abergavenny Small Press Literary Journal, After the Pause, Angel Rust Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Breathe Everyone!, Datura Literary Journal, Fresh Words, The Gorko Gazette, Graphic Violence Lit, The Highland Park Poetry Challenge, Last Leaves Magazines, Plants and Poetry Journal, Poetic Sun, Punk Monk Magazine, Silver Birch Press, They Call Us Feminist Literary Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, and The Washington Square Review. 

 Aftermath 

On the first day our Facebook pages went black. 

We drove to work through a film of tears 

and hugged each other in the hallways, unashamed,

and in the women’s room. We talked about renewing passports,

and families in Canada. We avoided referring

to the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale. We went

on to meet our classes, or conference with students

who complained, “I didn’t know

this assignment would be so evidence-based.” 

We kept our blurry eyes front, and flowed

through the day on a current of work and love. 

 

On the second day, we posted galaxies and poems

of resistance on Facebook, and the numbers

of suicide hotlines. And Joplin’s “Solace” was playing

on WKAR on the way in, and the sun

reached a few gentle fingers through the clouds.

 So at work we taped the resistance poems

to the inside stall doors in the women’s room. 

In the halls we wondered how the Refugee

Development Center was doing, how we could help. 

         We went on to conference with students who said, 

“I just kinda smushed two facts and two sources together,”

for the sake of convenience. 

 

And we slept several hours each night, albeit 

          with Ambien, which we had been off for three months. 

And now I have to admit that I have no idea

whether anyone has gone back on Ambien but me. 

But it feels so much better, stronger, safer, to say “we,”

like Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, explaining, 

“We put the butter on our skin.” She had no idea either. 

But a friend had posted on Facebook, “This is no reason

to break your sobriety,” so I know others are tempted 

to temporary oblivion, and I kind of smush

the facts together.  Which is I guess

a definition of fiction. On Monday I will see

 

the fact-smushing student, and tell him, 

“So maybe research is not your jam.  Maybe you prefer

fiction. But in these times, submerged in a flood

of information, wouldn’t it be good to have a few tools

to tell the difference?” I hope it will work.  I hope

he still believes in some kind of truth. Yesterday he wrote,

“I used a reliable source but the facts were wrong. I learned

not to trust the internet.”

 —Cheryl Caesar